In the global workplace, collaboration services provide versatile technologies to businesses and organizations to increase the efficiency of business processes and improve team productivity. Collaboration tools help diverse users stay connected across organizational and geographic boundaries. Collaboration services provide geographically diverse users access to information based on their needs.
Collaboration services help work teams stay connected and productive by providing easy access to team members, documents, and information. Expanded connectivity enables team members to make informed decisions and improve efficiency. And, recent enhancements in collaboration services, further improve upon sharing documents, tracking tasks, using e-mail efficacy, and idea and information sharing.
Modern collaboration services provide a single workspace for teams to coordinate schedules, organize documents, and participate in discussions within and outside the organization infrastructure. Services enable simplified authoring and managing of documents, and help to ensure document integrity with enhanced features such as: requiring document checkout before editing, viewing past revisions, restoring to previous versions, and setting document specific security. Despite increasingly available broadband connections and higher bandwidths, collaboration systems based on files stored strictly at a central location are at the mercy of connection quality. When connections are severed or link quality is reduced, user experience in collaborative environments may be degraded. On the other hand, local storage of documents is inherently against the collaborative service principles.